The Dark Lord

Robin Carolan’s Tri Angle record label.

Carolan, center, with two of his artists, the Haxan Cloak and Evian Christ.Credit Photograph by Ethan Levitas

The Tri Angle record label, run by the British expatriate Robin Carolan and based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is an obscure operation that also happens to be the meeting point for several highly charged but very different strands of pop music. The artists on Tri Angle—who include the Haxan Cloak, Evian Christ, Clams Casino, Forest Swords, and Vessel, and who come from both the U.S. and Britain—are equally at home with commercial hip-hop and roiling, dark, atonal noise. Underlying this sonic mishmash is a gentle sense of melody—the inheritance of a generation raised less on discrete songs than on a mulch of songs that are routinely fed through software, sampled, and slowed down, until they dissolve into entirely different things.

Around 2010, when this cohort of musicians first came together, attempts to categorize the music were almost comical: some of the first records that Carolan released, by the American groups Balam Acab and oOoOO, were described as “witch house.” The term suggested links to occult aspects of darkness (witch) and also to dance music (house), though few of the relevant records moved at the brisk pace of house music. Now, happily, though the groups that have coalesced under Tri Angle are peaking artistically, nobody is attempting to saddle the movement with a name.

Even when Tri Angle records are structurally dissimilar, they share a fondness for odd noises that skitter through the music. Evian Christ (a baby-faced young man named Josh Leary) produced the beat for Kanye West’s “I’m in It,” from “Yeezus,” which is likely to be the album of the year on many lists. West found Christ by listening to the Tri Angle release “Kings and Them,” which compiled a number of tracks that Leary had made at home on a cheap PC and uploaded to YouTube while he trained to be a kindergarten teacher in Ellesmere Port, England. “I’m in It” is the most sexually explicit song on “Yeezus”; the beat builds slowly, starting as just a rattling bass tone paired with silence and a female gasp. Eventually, it stumbles into intermittent snare drums, and sticks to a nasty, loping pace for a moment before elegantly atomizing again. It’s like a beautiful and surly teen-ager rendered as a beat—truculent but easily forgiven. At a recent show at Basilica Hudson, in upstate New York, Evian Christ played a set of spiky, distressed hip-hop and modified drum-and-bass that had the crowd moving.

In contrast, when the Haxan Cloak plays live, the only appropriate physical response seems to be immobility, brought on by complete absorption in the act’s extreme volume levels. Bobby Krlic, the twenty-seven-year-old producer who performs as the Haxan Cloak, has said that for a period of time he read everything he could about the Salem witch trials. (Häxan is Swedish for “witch.”) “Excavation,” his début on Tri Angle, is an astonishing record that I’ve played almost every day since it came out, in April. Long passages contain no rhythms of any kind. The bassy drones and ominous swells evoke the atmosphere and the dread of a Ridley Scott movie and have, at best, a tenuous relationship to pop music. Krlic’s range is impressive—though “Excavation” was rendered electronically, the Haxan Cloak’s previous album was made largely with stringed instruments, such as viola and cello, that Krlic played himself.

“Excavation” was the beginning of a Tri Angle hat trick of exceptional releases. It was followed by Evian Christ’s “Duga-3,” a psychedelic weave of ringing tones and decelerated voices, and Forest Swords’ ”Engravings.” On “Gathering,” from “Engravings,” a snatch of what sounds like choral music performed by five or six voices is chopped up irregularly, interspersed with silence, then accompanied by muffled piano and drums. Like many of the releases on Tri Angle, these records have the feel of a palimpsest, with traces of dozens of genres delivered through the medium of digital technology. It’s as if the same computers that make music accessible to everyone also somehow abraded the sound as it flew around the globe. An enthusiastic, hungry generation has become comfortable with what are called, in sound engineering, “artifacts”: the glitches and dropouts and streaks that represent missing data and the trips that data has made. If a previous era had surface noise on its vinyl, created by a mechanical stamper and the listener’s own use, this one has an array of sounds that are rooted in error, and in loss.

At the end of the last decade, Carolan, who was originally a curator and a promoter, was shuttling between his native London and New York. He was contributing to a blog called 20 Jazz Funk Greats, which was known for celebrating the work of up-and-coming artists. Carolan was inspired by the musicians around him who were playing with the manipulated hip-hop coming out of Houston—beats and vocals that are slowed down until their sources become unidentifiable—and also with what he called “a dreamy Cocteau Twins thing.” His first Tri Angle release, which came out in 2010, when he was twenty-four, was “Let Me Shine for You,” by multiple artists, a tribute to Lindsay Lohan and to the scrutiny that female celebrities face. “I kind of thought if you could actually be inside Lindsay Lohan’s head, that’s probably a really terrifying space to be in,” he said. “So I thought maybe I could get some guys to remake her songs as if they’re actually in her head.” The album was sufficiently obscure that it’s listed in the label’s catalogue as “00.” Tri Angle’s next release, however, Balam Acab’s five-song EP “See Birds,” was praised by the music press. The aesthetic of much of what followed on Tri Angle is in place on “See Birds”: low, buzzing bass tones, a narcotic sense of rhythm, plenty of reverb, and high, otherworldly voices and sounds that could be pipes or strings or tapes run backward—anything, really.

Carolan, a pale, tall, quiet man, has become the point person for a loose collective of musicians who are comfortable with pop impulses and sonic experimentation. “I always thought of the label as sort of a combination of Madonna, Björk, and Warp Records,” he said, referring to the pioneering British electronic-music label. Still, he said, “I do always want there to be some kind of melodic element.” Though that’s an accurate enough description of Tri Angle’s records, it doesn’t rule out an awful lot of haze and avant-garde noise. The through-line is a dark sound, but one that is flexible and often surprisingly inviting.

Carolan’s methods most resemble those of Richard Russell, the idiosyncratic head of XL Records. Russell has made a career of signing acts that have little in common except that they are very good: M.I.A.; Adele; Tyler, the Creator; and Vampire Weekend. Carolan’s most commercially successful act so far, the electronic-music duo AlunaGeorge, has moved to Island Records, so his business may not be as conventionally solid as Russell’s. But this is just another way of surviving as an independent label: finding talented artists and staying with them only as long as you can afford to. Carolan doesn’t have much of the macher about him.

When I met up with him one early-fall day, when everyone else was in shorts and T-shirts, he had on boots, very long denim shorts, and layers of black clothing under a roomy jacket. “I always dress like this,” he said. “I just hate it when it’s sunny. I can’t wait for it to get cold.” What unites the Tri Angle bands is Carolan’s cool warmth, and a belief that when the machines run down, and the rhythms fall away, beauty emerges. It’s music that seems built on its own erosion. Considering how many people on vacation traipse in and out of worn-down stone monuments, allegedly out of historical interest, it seems reasonable that Tri Angle is simply celebrating the beauty of decay, which isn’t such a new impulse. ♦

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